Holy Saturday is the holiest weekend in the Christian calendar, and it's also one of the holiest days of the Christian year. This year, Dr. Tom Williams joins us to discuss the importance of Holy Saturday and the idea of Christ's descent into hell.
00:25:47.160And what's amazing is the Christians have said, I'm not doing that.
00:25:51.020That light one thing of incense in front of a statue, not just the polytheism, but a statue of Augustus Caesar or whatever emperors at the time cuts to the core of my being.
00:26:05.920It's very chilling that the Christians had the option and were dangled often, not all the time, but dangled the option of just be performative and go about your business.
00:26:14.320They said, no, that that it's performative to you, but it cuts to the core of my faith and I won't do it.
00:26:20.100And they were then and they told him, hey, you're going to have the most heinous tortures if you don't.
00:26:25.240And they said, hey, it's it is what it is.
00:26:30.700And this unfortunately, this is exactly what we see today.
00:26:33.960There will always be the great temptation for modern Christians is accommodation.
00:26:39.300It is that willingness to do the modern equivalent of burning some incense before the statue of Caesar.
00:26:47.320And this is something that's why the Dick Durbin's and the Nancy Pelosi's and the Joe Biden's of this world are embraced by radical secularists.
00:26:56.800This is a Christianity that they can live with.
00:26:59.080Oh, you've got a rosary in your pocket.
00:27:00.600You're my kind of Christian because obviously your Christian faith does not impinge upon any of your moral beliefs, any of your political stances.
00:27:09.120It is something that doesn't change who you are.
00:27:13.260We will embrace you because you are willing to burn that incense to Caesar.
00:27:18.460And for Christians who take their faith seriously, they are the enemy.
00:27:21.780If you're, you know, Amy Coney Barrett and you come in and the dogma lives loudly in you, you are not acceptable.
00:27:28.460We will not give you a place at this table.
00:27:30.940We will do everything we can to thwart your rise here because we don't trust you, because we disqualify you because of that faith, because of that deeply held belief, because of that devotion that you feel.
00:27:45.780You're going to be problematic in your rulings because of that faith that you possess.
00:27:52.380So we see how, you know, history really does repeat itself.
00:27:56.720It is those Christians who are willing to live by their faith and take it seriously enough, they are the ones who are going to suffer for it.
00:28:02.720And if you're willing to accommodate, if you're willing to say, hey, you know, whatever, we can't stop progress.
00:28:08.640If this is the way society is going, let's just all get on board.
00:28:11.700Let's get on the bus and they'll let us keep our rosaries.
00:28:14.340You know, those are the ones who are going to do just fine.
00:28:19.620Hang on, Tom, we're going to take a break.
00:28:22.540We're going to talk about, by the way, we wouldn't have had Christianity bequeathed to us as it was if the early church had been accommodationist.
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00:30:18.080Okay, it is Holy Saturday, 8 April in the year of our Lord, 2023.
00:30:40.200This is our annual tradition of Christ's descent into hell.
00:30:43.920We always have a special guest that can walk us through some of the issues that the church faces.
00:30:49.420When someone of a profound thinker as Tom Williams actually takes a year or two of his life to write a book about the coming Christian persecution,
00:30:59.380why things are getting worse, and how to prepare for what is to come.
00:31:02.560First, I want to deal with how is it getting worse?
00:33:36.760Well, let's start with the Western media.
00:33:40.340The Western media simply ignores, but ignores, I don't really believe that it's because people don't know what's going on.
00:33:48.140There's an unwillingness to investigate and there's an unwillingness to report on the reality of Christian persecution around the world.
00:33:55.020It's something that is intentionally withheld from people.
00:33:58.560And so we talk, I talk to people all the time, very right thinking, good people who have no concept of the reality of Christian persecution in the world.
00:34:08.180They just do not understand how widespread it is, how violent it is, how terrible and terrifying it is in the world, because they never hear about it.
00:34:17.340They don't happen to read, you know, websites, the Christian website that actually investigate this, those reports that come out, which are never covered, obviously, on mainstream media.
00:34:29.220But one of the reasons, but hang on, but one of the reasons they don't know it is that it's not preached from the pulpit.
00:34:36.140It's not preached in the evangelical church.
00:34:37.920It's not preached in the Catholic church.
00:34:39.700It's, you know, all you hear, and particularly in the Catholic church, some in the more mainstream Protestant church, is dialogue, right?
00:34:47.400You never hear this coming from the Vatican.
00:34:49.320You never hear it preached on virtually any pulpit of a Catholic church on a Sunday.
00:34:54.160You very rarely hear it from any of the evangelical or even the outside of the mainstream Christian preachers, unless somebody is tied to missionary work in sub-Saharan Africa, or they're tied to missionary work in the Middle East, like in Iraq.
00:35:11.880I mean, is it one of the reasons we're not hearing it?
00:35:14.780It's not just the mainstream media is in the media's fault.
00:35:17.680The church, there's something about the church is not putting this front and center is that, hey, there's a problem here.
00:35:24.380They're coming after us in a very organized way, whether that is in communist China, in sub-Saharan Africa, in eradication of the Christians in the cradle of Christianity, which is the Near East or the Middle East.
00:35:37.740I mean, isn't one of the central things to hear that either because they're afraid to talk about it or they like their international organizations and they don't want to be out there actually defending Christianity, that the more official aspects of the Christian and Catholic church won't address this?
00:36:28.120Nothing, we shouldn't be arguing about this.
00:36:29.900We shouldn't be, you know, pointing out differences.
00:36:33.320We shouldn't be living out to the full who we are.
00:36:37.140We should be willing to accommodate and to bend and to fit in.
00:36:40.500This is, this is, this is, see, this is what the emperors, this is what the savvy and smart emperors, cunning emperors in the, in the, in the first century and second century offered up was the accommodation.
00:36:53.280All you got to do is burn a little bit of incense.
00:36:55.500You don't even, they didn't even demand that you believe it.
00:36:58.260All you have to do is just give me, give me a little burn there in the dish and go about your merry way.
00:37:03.580Isn't that exactly what's happened here with the, with the institutional church in, in the 21st century when the church is under, as you make in the book, one of the things that's most compelling.
00:37:13.060You actually make the case that the persecution today in the 21st century is probably worse in any metric you want to, want to look at than, than in the first and second century of the early church, sir.
00:37:26.680Yes. Well, that is, that is, that's, I think, verifiably, statistically true.
00:37:32.960It's just the, the pervasiveness of, of Christian persecution in the world.
00:37:37.000The fact that 75% of people who are persecuted for whatever faith they belong to happen to be Christians, that there are some 360 million Christians who live under severe persecution in danger of their lives every day.
00:37:49.840These are, these are facts and figures that are, that are so startling and so, but again, so unknown.
00:37:56.180This is really the untold story that so many people are ignorant of.
00:38:01.560And look, you know, the Catholic Catholics in the, in the United States, we have a whole history of this.
00:38:05.980There's always been a temptation because Catholics were very persecuted early on as, as, you know, the Irish and the Polish and the, and sometimes Germans.
00:38:13.620And they did everything in their power to make it look like, oh, I'm, I'm first an American and then I'm a Catholic, right?
00:38:22.080It was a temptation to fit into assimilate, to make it show that you're a better citizen, show that you're, and this, we got John F. Kennedy out of this, you know, the one who said, you know, I'm not, I'm first an American, I'm going to be an American.
00:38:33.420And, and this is something that there's always been a struggle in kind of the Catholic spirit in the U.S., but it's only more recently the evangelicals and the Protestants have joined in that same timidness and that same unwillingness to say, you know, I am a Christian and I uphold, and my allegiance to Jesus Christ is actually superior to any other allegiance as I have.
00:38:54.620And it's what makes me a good citizen, what makes me a loyal patriot is because I actually do believe, and I believe that I should be loyal to my nation.
00:39:03.960But this is something that we're very afraid of right now.
00:39:08.740We're so afraid of being considered to be obscurantists, to be considered to be, you know, less cool than the academics who say that this is something that's very passe.
00:39:21.300And this is, this is the great temptation of our day.
00:39:23.560And it's why so few people are willing to stand up and be counted and just say, hey, yeah, I'm an educated person and I am a Christian and I believe in the creed.
00:39:33.420I recite it on Sunday and I believe it.
00:39:35.500And I try to, you know, base my life around this because these are the truths that actually give firm grounding to my existence and explain reality to me.
00:39:44.660This is what explains human existence and my personal existence in the most cogent, coherent way that I've ever seen that I can imagine.
00:39:53.160But many Christians don't want to do that.
00:39:54.960They want to keep that away in the little catacombs of their house.
00:39:58.360And when they walk out on the street, they want to look like everybody else.
00:40:02.060They don't want to be seen as somehow different because it's dangerous.
00:40:06.420It's it's uncomfortable to be different.
00:40:09.380But this is the world we live in and we have to stand up or else we're going to get the situation that we're getting right now.
00:40:15.760Did you see any because I know you follow this and we follow it quite closely.
00:40:21.600Do you remember any big names in either the institutional Protestant church or the Catholic church or even come up and condemn what happened against the children at the Covenant School?
00:40:35.100Was there any outrage at all in the Christian community as far as you saw it?
00:40:38.440One person that I saw, and I do follow this as closely as I can, Franklin Graham, whom I'm a big fan of.
00:40:46.980I think he's he's a worthy scion of his father.
00:40:50.480I did did make a couple of very interesting Facebook posts.
00:40:55.740He's got 10 million followers and he brought this up and said that was he said evil walked into that school that day.
00:41:02.260He actually was very poetic and very, you know, stern in the way that he described the situation.
00:41:10.340I mean, he hasn't gone into the whole question of this transgender in the way that the mainstream media are addressing it.
00:41:18.240But he did definitely come down very, very hard and brought up the fact that these were Christians who were killed because they were Christians.
00:41:25.240I mean, is it your warning is why things are going to get worse?
00:41:31.620Isn't one of the reasons it's going to get worse because Christian leadership, Christian leadership in the Catholic church, the mainstream Protestant churches, leading evangelicals were to basically draw a line now and say this is going to stop on our watch.
00:41:47.000Isn't that one of the most important things?
00:41:48.880Isn't that the beginning of stopping it getting worse?
00:41:53.600Absolutely. But part of the reason it's going to get worse is because we're just not seeing that.
00:41:58.460And I think that even when an isolated Christian leader or a Catholic bishop in some diocese stands up and makes, you know, makes a strong case right now, those bishops are not getting support from Rome.
00:42:26.440And I think that that is the reason this very tiny minority of those who are willing to speak out.
00:42:31.860We're just not seeing the kind of leadership we need right now to bring attention to the dire reality that we're living.
00:42:37.920Tom, if you could hang on for a second, we're going to take a short commercial break.
00:42:43.940We've got Dr. Tom Williams, who's the author of many, many books, principally about theology.
00:42:49.340He's written this really for crisis, crisis publication, the coming Christian persecution with someone as deep and profound as Dr.
00:42:59.500Williams takes on about the persecution of the Christian church, particularly the subtitle, why things are getting worse and how to prepare for what is to come.
00:43:09.540If you're if you're a believing Christian is quite stark book, but a must read and more importantly, must understand the argument.
00:43:19.420OK, we're going to take a short commercial break.
00:45:09.160Why did why did why was Christianity able to survive the immense persecution of the Roman state, particularly that era called the Great Persecution?
00:45:23.760And what lessons does that have for modern man?
00:45:26.820Well, the short answer, I think, is that fantastic line from the Christian apologist, Tertullian, who said that the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.
00:45:41.100And that not only does that not stop us when we're persecuted, it actually makes us stronger.
00:45:50.440And I think that that was something that Tertullian could say because he saw it happening around him.
00:45:56.620And I think what it really was was not the persecution itself, but it was the the witness of those who are willing to die for their faith was so compelling.
00:46:07.120When so many people are just worried about saving their own skin, just worried about the comforts in their life, just worried about making their way through, not getting any bad attention, those who are willing to actually shed their blood for Jesus Christ and for their belief in him.
00:46:23.480That was something that was something that I think inspired many, many generations of followers to want to share in that same sort of devotion, that same sort of all or nothing spirit of what it really means to to to to be a Christian.
00:46:40.380And I think that that is something that we see in different generations as well.
00:46:45.040I think that wherever there are these very violent and very harsh persecutions, when you have these great saints that arise in those situations, those who are willing to suffer something for the name of Jesus, that that's something that really does bear great, great fruit.
00:47:01.100I think both because of the human witness that it provides and also, I think, the grace of God that actually acts through that and inspires many people to want to live the same way.
00:47:11.240You talk about the difference between red, red and white martyrdom.
00:47:29.460So if you are put to death, if you're put on a cross, if you're, you know, whatever it might be, the different many different creative forms by which Christians have been killed down to the centuries, whether it was the beasts or the rack or whatever it might have been.
00:47:45.140White martyrdom is a sort of persecution where you don't actually shed your blood, but you live in a constant situation of discomfort, of harassment, of hostility, of people making your life really unpleasant and an unwillingness to change in the face of that.
00:48:05.440So these pressures that are put upon Christians, again, to conform, to accommodate, those who are unwilling to do so often live a sort of white martyrdom because, you know, they lose their professorship or they, you know, are treated in a different way and they're looked down upon and ostracized because of those different beliefs.
00:48:25.480Persecution takes many forms, sometimes the more insidious, sometimes the more blatant and open and violent, but all of it constitute a way of bearing witness to Christ in the world and being willing to suffer something for that.
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